On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org wrote:
On 08/02/2012 10:52 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
In the world of platonic license forms, the structure doesn't matter. But in the world of actually reading and interpreting licenses, structure matters.
I agree.
With no offense to our host, I find reading/interpreting LGPL v3 maddening for exactly this structural reason, and I am pretty sure I'm in the majority in this area. And I actually like GPL v3; for those who are for predisposed not to like v3 for any of the various reasons available, LGPL v3's structure is only insult to injury.
Hmm. Are you saying that you find LGPLv3 maddening to read/interpret because you have to map its terms to GPLv3 and this is difficult, or are you saying instead that you find the substantive terms (the additional permissions) of LGPLv3 maddening to read/interpret?
The former, definitely! (I have quibbles with some bits of the latter, but that's the case with any legal document.)
<snip>
But anyway, I assume you mean instead that it's maddening to have to map a non-trivial set of additional permissions to a separate license text. I'm curious if you have a similar criticism of the GCC Runtime Library Exception (current version 3.1 at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html) though that is much simpler than LGPLv3.
In that case, my objections are of the latter form (objections to the language of the exception) rather than the former (objections to license + exceptions structure). As I think you intuit, that's because the set of additional permissions involved there are much smaller and simpler (relatively speaking) and so easier to map onto GPL.
To tie this more closely with copyleft-next, I believe that the FSF's decision to draft LGPLv3 as a set of additional permissions is historically significant, as I see it as an acknowledgement by the FSF that structural or formal simplicity and brevity in a license document (or at least the appearance of it) can be useful and valuable for developers and users.
I agree that brevity is important, but the interaction between the two sets of restrictions/permissions, and the "I have to have two documents in front of me to read the thing" in this particular case outweighs the benefits, IMHO.
Anyway, Free Software licenses are about public policy and philosophy. The rest is, ultimately, just details.
Adoption is intimately linked to achievement of any public policy goals, and ease of comprehension (encompassing not just policy but also drafting and structure) is intimately linked to adoption.
I agree with that too (though sometimes I've wondered if it's wishful thinking on my part).
Clearly, the policy choices embodied in the license have a huge impact; as you noted in a separate thread, GPL v3 has some clauses that have had a significantly negative impact on GPL v3 adoption even after a lot of careful drafting. But that doesn't mean that structure and clarity don't have a significant impact.
Luis